Society and Urban Infrastrucutre in the "Information Age"

The theme of technology dependency in urban theory today can be easily located in the design and redevelopment of metropolitan infrastructures over the past twenty years. The increasingly complicated interface between physical layouts, social organization, and electronic networks has come to direct the formal development of urban design and planning, and has impeded the effectiveness of classical models of planning in contemporary culture. It is in this interface that “new” urban forms have evolved in both the formal and informal sectors. That is, as urban infrastructures have complexified, they have splintered into smaller and often times redundant networks, configured by the new electronic pipelines of modern urban civilization. This progression of thinking opens up an all together new perspective of understanding the city not only as systems of communication, but also as "machines of deliberate segmentation," and to an extreme extent, often marginalization. The contradictory and complementary relationship between metropolitan centrality and the electronic and digital systems required to enable both traditional and communicative forms of infrastructure has in many ways created a virtual wall around modern cities beyond which "formal" growth is not possible. Beyond these technological corsets, modern systems and technologies are not effective in their formal applications and are perceived as unprescriptive objects used to sustain an entirely different model of urban development.

In the urban rendering at the top of the page, New Delhi is presented as a city where modern infrastructure has been retrofit with increasing frequency into a formal nineteenth century design, with peri-urban growth metastasizing around the city-proper where the infrastructure networks end. In the model below, Brasilia is representative of a "modern" city where architecture, society, economics and infrastructure where conceived of simultaneously, and conflated into a singular, prescriptive vision, where urban amendment is limited and peripheral development is similarly quarantined to beyond the extents of central infrastructure. The third model, Abu Dahbi with the Foster proposal for Masdar City, is a startling representation of a new twenty-first century theory of urbanism, where infrastructure, architecture, society and communications are embodied in an autonomous, packaged urban unit. In this model, the desert climate of Abu Dahbi cannot sustain any significant type of peri-urban settlement and growth beyond the city-proper has developed in the form of walled “cyborg cities” or hybrid cities, made up of an indistinguishable intertwining of “flows and places.”

Notes:

Manuel Castells, Space of Flows, Space of Places: Materials for a Theory of Urbanism in the Information Age. 2004

Jyoti Hosagrahar. Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism. 2005